If the numbers of home-schooled families ever gets beyond about 10%, I’ll be astonished. My vote goes towards more charter schools. I haven’t quite give up on public schools, but from what I read and hear on this forum, a good percentage of them are beyond saving. Public schools used to do a good job. Maybe they still can, but it would take uprooting the teachers unions and the prevailing liberal atmosphere.
“If the numbers of home-schooled families ever gets beyond about 10%,...”
Whether it ever does or doesn’t, it readily COULD.
I’m ambivalent toward charter schools. In the short term, they can be a good alternative for kids who would otherwise be imprisoned in poor public schools.
But let’s be frank, they’re a response by the public system to the difference in quality between even mediocre private schools and most public schools, a difference that doesn’t favor the public schools. Without the fact that ordinary private schools are far better than most public schools, charters just wouldn’t exist.
But the presence of charter schools hurts private schools, as it offers, if not quite the same quality as most private schools, a quality that is “good enough,” especially considering the difference in cost.
Yet, even as charters erode support for private schools, the education establishment works to undermine charters through various forms of deception, fraud, and theft. In my own region, charters have enjoyed some success in Washington, DC and in parts of Maryland. But now, the education industry is beginning to successfully start to move against the foundations of the charter school movement that make charters successful. The education industry is starting to succeed in forcing charters to be staffed by union teachers, forcing tenure on them, forcing folks to be certified as teachers (meaning, often, that they have worthless “education” degrees), reining in the authority of charter school principals, etc.
So, as charters move in for the kill on many private schools, destroying the very competitors that forced the education industry to permit the existence of independent, publicly-funded charter schools, they slowly become creatures of the education industry that made the rest of the public school gulag what it is today.
All supported by my tax dollars.
The ultimate solution is the disestablishment of education, the separation of school and state.
How we get there is another topic, as is the question of what parents should do with their children in the meantime.
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